I mean, shit, seriously shit. You think this is convincing? Just because you MADE IT REALLY BIG.

Let me tell you something. In 1983, there were no mobile phones in the UK at all. None. Zilch. Zero. At the same time, there were 17 diagnosed cases of AIDS. However, by 2008, mobiles had been introduced, there were 76.9 million of them, and at the same time, AIDS was on the rise, with 77,600 reported cases in the UK alone. At the last count in 2013, AIDS had reached 96,000 cases and mobiles 82.7 million – more than one per person.

OH MY GOD. MOBILE PHONES CAUSE AIDS. RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!

Or not. Because they are just two increasing statistics picked out of the air. Like vaccinated children and autism rates.

The origin of the Autism-Vaccine Myth, by the way, is Andrew Wakefield. He was a very unpleasant man who was struck off the medical register in May 2010 and barred from practicing medicine in the UK because of dishonest falsification.

What does that mean?

Well, Andrew Wakefield, and 12 other authors (10 of whom formally retracted this interpretation of the evidence in 2004) wrote a paper saying that autism was linked to the MMR vaccine. This paper was based on

only 12 children

who were submitted to inappropriately invasive investigations

published without approval of the ethics committee

It is also worth noting that

Wakefield owned the patent to a rival vaccine to MMR

The fact that so many people have heard of this scare does not validate the evidence.

Afterall, many people have heard of Scientology, but still visit doctors; or temperance, but still drink alcohol (and alcohol actually does you harm…).

This myth is harmful.

Taylor (2002) noticed that the onset of autism was dated as significantly later in a child’s life post MMR scare than pre-scare. Not only this, parents who had previously reported symptoms early in life, changed their story after being exposed to the scare. This means that exposure to the myth is resetting parents’ memories, potentially masking information on real causes.

The truth is, that not vaccinating your children kills.

There is no evidence that autism is linked to the MMR vaccine. The General Medical Council investigated the autism claim in 2004 and concluded it unfounded. Every year, thousands of children die from measles. I call that evidence.